Last Night's Scandal (19 page)

But his gloved hand barely touched hers before he drew it away to indicate a doorway, blocked by weeds and rubbish, at ground level.

“There,” he said. “We’ve a basement comprising three rooms in the main block. Arched vaults. A well room in the south wing. I’ve assigned you women to the south tower. It’s a bit warmer and brighter. The Harpies will be on the lower levels because the stairs will kill them.”

She looked up, up, up, to the top of the castle. The inner stairways would be narrow and steeply winding. And dark. In olden times, any enemies who managed to get inside could easily be trapped and killed before they got far.

“A drawbridge and portcullis would be more romantic,” she said, starting up the unromantic stairs.

“Would a dungeon make it up to you?” he said. “Because we’ve a fine dank one in the north wing of the basement.”

“I’m sure it will come in handy,” she said.

“It isn’t functional at present,” he said. “Except for the well room, the basement rooms are in a ruinous state. One of the stairways leading down from the first floor has been vandalized. Still, that and the curtain wall seem to represent the worst of the depredations.” She reached the top of the stairs. The door opened and she stepped past the servant holding it into and through a short passage. Then she simply stood stock-still and gaped like the veriest yokel.

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“I had the same reaction,” came Lisle’s voice from behind her. “To hear my parents carry on, you’d think we had trees growing in the fireplace and birds nesting in the minstrel gallery.”

She’d known his parents had exaggerated. They always did. Still, nothing had prepared her for this sight.

It was a great banqueting hall, and yes, she’d been in plenty of them. But those were richly furnished, offering every modern comfort. They didn’t show their origins as plainly as this one did.

Above her rose a great pointed vault. To her left, at the end of the long hall, a fire blazed in an immense fireplace with a cone-shaped stone hood. On either side of it were large niches where someone had set candles.

The room was splendid. Though almost completely unfurnished, it was much as it would have appeared centuries ago, when Mary, Queen of Scots, visited.

This, she thought, must be a little of what Lisle felt when he first came upon an ancient temple: a sense of stepping into another, older world.

She was vaguely aware of servants moving out into the hall, lining up, waiting, and she knew she was supposed to marshal them into order, but for the moment, all she could do was take in her surroundings.

“Fifty-five feet long and twenty-five feet wide,” came Lisle’s voice beside her. “Thirty feet from the floor to the top of the pointed barrel vault. The minstrels’ gallery seems to have been replaced in the last century. There was a screens passage under it. I’m not sure that needs to be replaced.”

She turned to him. “It’s splendid.”

“I’m glad you think so,” he said. “I hope you’ll convey its splendor to the servants. They seem to be dubious.”

“I will,” she said fervently. She knew exactly what to do. This was what she’d come for. To turn a ruin into something magnificent and bring a village back to life. To do something worthwhile.

She turned her attention to the line of servants, who didn’t appear at all happy. Strangely, the ones who’d been here for a few days did not seem to be in a greater state of trepidation than those who’d come with her. She supposed that Lisle had done his best to keep up morale. But they were all London servants, after all. They must have felt they’d stepped into the Dark Ages.

She didn’t square her shoulders visibly, but she did it mentally. This part she could easily do. The sooner she did it, the more quickly their work here would be done.

Then he could go back to his one true love and she—

Oh, for heaven’s sake, she was only two and twenty. She still had time to find her own true love, too.

The odds weren’t good but she’d beat long odds before.

Only look at how far she’d come since the day she’d met him. And now she had a castle

—not forever, but then, she wasn’t a forever sort of girl.

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An hour later

Lisle knew Olivia was a chameleon. She could mimic not only accent and dialect but posture and manner. He’d seen her fit in among street urchins and pawnbrokers and peddlers. Why shouldn’t she as easily assume the role of chatelaine of the castle?

Still, he was startled when, shortly after entering, she took off her ludicrous hat and turned into her step-grandmother, Lady Hargate. The romantic, breathless Olivia he’d seen standing in the road became cool and detached and absolutely in control, as she set about directing the servants.

The first priority was making the great hall comfortable, since they’d be spending most of their time here. Nichols had had the first group of servants clean the room. After inspecting their work, Olivia set about directing the placement of furniture and such.

When Lisle realized he was studying her the way he’d study a mummy’s wrappings, he collected his wits and left the hall.

He went to his room and gave himself a lengthy and logical lecture about spellbinding women who turned into sandstorms. Then he gathered his plans and drawings and returned to her.

Very coolly and logically, he said, as he gave them to her, “I thought you’d find it easier to understand the castle’s layout if you had these.”

She took out the sheets of paper and set them out on the large table the servants had hefted into the center of the room. She studied them for a time, and the firelight and candlelight danced in the curious arrangement of curls her maid had made atop her head.

“Oh, Lisle, this is brilliant,” she said.

If he wrapped one of those curls about his finger, what would it feel like?

“I have some of your cousin Frederick Dalmay’s books and papers,” she said. “They do contain drawings and plans, but nothing so detailed as these.”

“It’s what I usually do when I come upon an unfamiliar structure,” he said. “I needed to be doing something productive. The downpour limited activity, and that started the first day.”

“It rained in Edinburgh, a little every day.” She didn’t look up. She was still studying the drawings and plans and notes.

“It was more than a little here,” he said. “The cold stream of rain commenced at Coldstream, our first stop after Nichols and I left Alnwick. I suppose that’s Scotland’s idea of a joke. It rained throughout the ride here. It didn’t stop raining until last night. Surveying the house kept me busy.”

It was supposed to keep disturbing thoughts at bay, too. That part hadn’t worked so well.

“Is this what you do in Egypt?” she said.

“Yes. After we clear away the sand.”

“Your drawings are beautiful,” she said, looking up at last.

He looked at the drawings spread out on the table, then into her face.

That beautiful color in her cheeks. It seemed to come from within, but perhaps the
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candlelight enhanced it. Even in daytime, not much light survived the long journey from outside through the narrow windows and fifteen-foot wall.

“I’m not joking, and it isn’t flattery,” she said. “Your draftsmanship is excellent.” They exchanged a smiling glance, and that said everything, he thought. They were thinking the same thing: The first day he’d met her, she’d told him that his drawings were dreadful.

“It’s taken me only a decade to progress from ‘execrable’ to ‘excellent,’ ” he said.

She turned back to the drawing. He watched her slim finger trace the outline of the first floor’s great bedchamber.

“This simplifies everything,” she said.

Did it? Or had everything become impossibly complicated: the slender, graceful finger and her fine-boned hand and the way her skin glowed in the dusky light of this ancient hall and the smile at a shared memory.

He stepped a pace away, before he could be tempted to touch. “It makes it easier to set priorities for repairs,” he said. “When and if we ever get workmen, I’ll know precisely where they’re to begin and what they’re to do.”

“That’s why you were in the village today,” she said.

“For all the good it did,” he said.

“I can’t believe you had no luck with the villagers,” she said. “You manage hordes of workers in Egypt.”

“It’s different there,” he said. “I know enough of the various languages to communicate, and I know their ways. Scotland’s culture is altogether different. But I suspect Gorewood’s inhabitants are being thick on purpose because they don’t want to understand me. And I’ll wager anything they lay the burr on thick on purpose because they don’t want me to understand
them
.”

“I’m wild to get to the bottom of that,” she said. “You’re the laird’s son. They have a problem with your castle. They ought to feel they can confide their worries to you.”

“Perhaps they don’t find me the confiding sort.”

She brushed this away with a wave of her hand. “Don’t be silly. All you have to do is stand there to inspire trust, unlike the rest of us. But I must keep to one thing at a time. Our servants first.”

“Yes, sorry about that,” he said. “I didn’t mean to lose the butler.” She turned away from the drawings to give him her full attention.

“Edwards,” she said. “I meant to ask you—but the sight of the castle knocked everything else from my mind. Then I saw the servants, all looking so—so-”

“Suicidal,” he said. “One can’t blame them. They’ve had to camp out in the great hall, exactly as their predecessors would have done centuries ago. I’m amazed they haven’t all bolted.”

Her blue eyes lit with interest. “You think Edwards bolted?”

“So it would ap—”

A roar and a horrific crash cut him off.

The door to the kitchen passage flew open, and the kitchen staff irrupted into the great
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hall.

T
he roaring—human—continued, in spurts.

Olivia looked at the kitchen help cowering under the minstrel gallery, then at the door to the kitchen passage, then at Lisle.

“Must be Aillier,” he said, naming the London cook she’d sent to feed them. “He’s been a little sullen lately.”

“A
little
sullen?” she said.

“We’ve been living on cold meat and cheese,” Lisle said. “He won’t bake. He says the oven is an abomination. I wanted to pitch him out of the window, but he probably wouldn’t fit

—and if he did, we’d be short a cook as well as a butler.” Olivia’s chin went up. “I may help you pitch him out of the window,” she said, in the same coolly indignant tones Lady Hargate would have used. “Not bake bread, indeed. No wonder the staff are so dispirited.”

Head high, eyes blazing, she swept toward the kitchen.

Nichols, who’d been talking to one of the frightened kitchen servants, hurried into her path, to block the door. “I beg your pardon for standing in the way, Miss Carsington, but it isn

’t safe. I’m told he’s threatening with the cleaver. I recommend you allow me to disarm him first.”

Olivia eyed Nichols up and down. He could probably don armor and still not weigh ten stone.

“He’s tougher than he looks,” Lisle said, reading her thoughts exactly. “And stronger,” he added in an undertone. “With remarkable stamina—or such at least is his reputation among the womenfolk of Egypt.”

His voice was too low and his mouth was too close to her ear. His breath was warm, tickling her ear and a sensitive place behind it.

She didn’t have time for this.

Men.

“Thank you, Nichols,” she said, “but we cannot allow you to precede us.” She turned to Lisle and added, in a voice as low as his had been, “We can’t let it seem that we’re intimidated by a temperamental French cook. The villagers will hear about it and laugh themselves sick.”

“Sorry, Nichols,” Lisle said more audibly. “We can’t let you have all the fun. Miss Carsington and I will sort this out.”

Olivia waved her hand imperiously.

Nichols stepped out of the way.

More roaring came from behind the door.

Olivia glared at Nichols. He opened the door.

She stormed into the dragon’s lair.

O
livia tried to get ahead of him in the short passage, but Lisle grasped her waist, picked her up, and put her down behind him. The last bit—setting her down again—wasn’t nearly as
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easy as it ought to be. She was lighter than she looked; the mountainous clothing deceived the eye. It rustled too alluringly, too like the sound of bedclothes being tossed about. It brought back to the front of his mind the slenderness and delicacy of her feet, the grace of her fingers, the silken feel of her skin under his hands.

All the dreams and fantasies he’d so rigorously suppressed rose up like ghosts. He beat them down again.

“You can do the talking,” he said. “But I’m going first in case of deadly missiles.”

“Don’t be absurd,” she said. “You think I can’t handle menials?” She elbowed him sharply in the ribs and pushed past him into the kitchen proper. Cursing under his breath, Lisle followed close on her heels.

Over her shoulder he saw a red-faced Aillier brandishing a cleaver. Since he was nearly six feet tall and three feet wide and surrounded by extremely sharp blades, it required no prescience to understand why the kitchen staff had fled when he exploded.